Fun with AI Content Generation — What It Can and Cannot Do

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

This is the first in a series of articles about what kind of writing quality you can get from an AI. A few weeks ago I tried the free trials of some different commercial Artificial Intelligence content creation engines based on GPT-3 technology. If you haven’t yet heard of this, consider this quote from its Wikipedia article:

Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3) is an autoregressive language model that uses deep learning to produce human-like text… The quality of the text generated by GPT-3 is so high that it can be difficult to determine whether or not it was written by a human

Don’t Gossip

This was my first exercise, and I think it did OK. I wrote a book called Don’t Say That at Work, which is a collection of painful lessons I learned by making all sorts of communication mistakes over the past 25 years or so. The book has done reasonably well, so I have been considering a sequel. I asked some of my Twitter followers what other topics I should hit. One of them was about gossip.

I am not a huge gossiper, and as I said, I had just gotten a free trial to one of the AIs. I thought it might be fun to see what it could do for me.

Here is what it generated from the prompt: blog post about the dangers of gossip at work. I’ll intersperse its results with my own commentary.

In the working world, gossip is a serious problem. You can think of gossip as any kind of negative critique that’s said behind someone’s back. While we might sometimes want to believe that gossiping is a victimless crime, that couldn’t be further from the truth.

Hmm. That’s a pretty good opener, and admittedly better than I would have come up with on my own.

Gossiping — regardless of who is the subject of the gossip and who is saying it — is toxic based on four reasons: It’s a huge confidence killer. It’s incredibly easy to find out whether someone is gossiping about you, and when they do, it’s unlikely that they’re talking good things. While you may hope that they’re just saying positive things about you, that’s not typically the case.

At first glance, it’s not bad. The paragraph immediately dives in and expands on why gossip is harmful. However…